"Be thou assured, if words be made of breath, And breath of life, I have no life to breathe What thou hast said to me."
She may safely promise that, when she means to repair to the King with quite a different version of Hamlet's condition, the very one upon which he counts to keep the King deceived. And in the next scene she conveys her strong impression to him:--
QUEEN. Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend Which is the mightier. In his lawless fit, Behind the arras hearing something stir, He whips his rapier out, and cries, "A rat!" And in his brainish apprehension kills The unseen good old man.
She is the mother of the physiological criticism which issues from insane asylums to wonder why Hamlet is not an inmate: and Hamlet himself, by deceiving his mother, furnished to psychological criticism the text that he was mad in craft. Between the lines of the genuine Hamlet you can read that Shakspeare belonged to neither school.
Hamlet gives us unconsciously an opportunity to infer his ability to frame the incoherences which real madness suggests to one who would feign it. It occurs directly upon the Queen's suspicion, who, being unable to see her husband's ghost standing in her chamber, exclaims,--
"This is the very coinage of your brain: This bodiless creation ecstasy Is very cunning in."
Hamlet, repelling the insinuation, says,--
"It is not madness That I have uttered: bring me to the test, And I the matter will re-word, which madness Would gambol from."
And herein he implies that as he can construct the phrases of sanity, being all the time of a sound mind, so the soundness would serve him to invent the _non sequiturs_ of madness. If, then, he purposed to feign it when he said that perhaps he might hereafter put on an antic disposition, the reader may ask why so subtle a person did not carry out his plan. No doubt, it occurred to him that, as he travelled towards his purpose, his demeanor must be of the kind that would cover up his traces. But he could baffle Polonius and the other spies by the natural penetration of a mind that suspicion had sharpened. Those emergencies did not call for any style of feigning. It is enough for him to finger the ventages of a recorder and invite Guildenstern to play upon it; the latter understands that he knows no touch of Hamlet, and leaves the heart of that mystery to be voiced by the varying breaths of critics.